“I wrote novels the way people tinker with cars or go to the golf course. It was just a way to pass time,” says New York Times bestselling author John Gilstrap. “It was never a goal, per se, to publish a novel. The first three books I wrote were for me and they weren’t very good. But each was better than the one that proceeded it.”
Gilstrap wrote dozens of short stories while attending James W. Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax County, Va. and edited his school newspaper. He always loved reading and writing. But it wasn’t until he owned his own safety consulting business that he found the time to get serious about writing his first published novel, Nathan’s Run.
His local government in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. was going to make serious cuts to some of its human services programs. Being an active member of the local business community, Gilstrap volunteered to be on a citizens committee to review the cuts. He admits the committee gave elected officials the political cover they needed.
He decided to visit a local juvenile detention center to see for himself what the task ahead was all about. That’s where he saw a 12-year-old standing alone in a far corner of a large activity room where older boys ages 17 and 18 were talking and playing basketball.
The kid, says Gilstrap, looked miserable. He wondered about the young boy and the difference in age from the others and how lonely he must have felt. Gilstrap also thought how scary it must be for the youngster to cope with being incarcerated and away from family and friends. The moment stuck with him. Juvenile detention had to be a terrifying place to be.
That was the psychological spark for Nathan’s Run, a novel about a young boy in juvenile detention who is abused by one of his guards and is so scared he accidentally kills his abuser. The boy runs, escaping from the facility with no plan for where he’ll go or what he’ll do. He has a two-hour head start before the dead guard is discovered, which is nothing for a naïve youth up against trained law enforcement. And later, he discovers, the law is not the only one pursuing him.
Did the kid do the right thing by stopping the abuse? Who allowed it to happen? That is the underlying theme of Nathan’s Run.
Gilstrap was a fulltime industrial safety consultant. His Type-A personality having fallen in love with being a volunteer firemen, he went on to get his master’s degree in safety engineering. Not long after he found himself in Montana traveling between clients. He hadn’t realized when he flew west just how vast the state was and how far apart his clients were. He had eight hours of solitary driving time––time to develop his plot for his thriller. When he got to his hotel, “I had ninety-nine percent of it done.” He immediately began typing and completed the plot in two days. He finished his novel in four months.
“I realized this was good. This was as good as books I was reading by other people. I know that because I knew my others were not. I was writing the story as if I was telling a friend. It was my vernacular. No fancy words.”
“That’s when I started looking seriously at how to reveal story beats. I was really wordy and very writerly…I came to this realization that my best writing was when I was not trying to be writerly, when I was just telling a story.”
Nathan’s Run was rejected by 27 agents. Molly Friedrich was one of them. She didn’t like the title, so she didn’t bother to read Gilstrap’s entire query package. Instead, she handed it off to her assistant, Sheri Holman, to write a yet another rejection letter to an aspiring novelist. Friedrich prided herself on not sending form rejections. In going over his material, Holman noticed Gilstrap was a fellow alum of the College of William and Mary, so she actually read his synopsis. “You better read this,” she told Friedrich.
“I was teaching a safety course in North Carolina,” says Gilstrap. He’d just come back from his lunch break when someone handed him a message: “John Gilstrap call Molly.”
“I found a conference room and called at break time, and heard the heavy throated, smoky voice of Molly. ‘I love your book and would like to represent you as long as you would change a few things.’”
“I didn’t know at that time that rejection comes by mail and acceptance comes by phone call.”
She sold it in three days to Harper Collins. The young protagonist caught their attention, Gilstrap says. No one had a dry eye at the end of the story. He describes Nathan’s Run as a thriller with a heart. The moral code of his stories has been described as old school westerns in a modern-day setting.
“I don’t think I’ve ever captured that level of emotion in a book again. Part of it was my son was that age at the time.”
But it wasn’t over. Molly called to tell him she’d sold the rights to his novel in Brazil, Great Britain, France, and a twenty-two other countries. She’s sold his book on a Wednesday and then called on Friday and asked, “How does it feel to be the most talked about author in New York?” Publisher’s Weekly, she said, was going to run a story.
Then she asked him what he was doing that night. Well, seeing that it was Friday in the Gilstrap household, it was pizza and movie night. She told him to stay near the phone, seven movie studios were bidding on the film rights. He was numb. He’d never imagined anything like this.
Mathew Snyder, his movie agent with Creative Artists called to tell him two studios had dropped out of the bidding war. Phone calls volleyed back and forth all evening. Finally, the last studios, Fox, Disney, and Warner Bros., went head-to-head. Snyder called again to tell him Fox had just dropped out.
“A ridiculous amount of money was on the table from Disney, but it was good for only ten minutes,” says Gilstrap. Snyder told him he hadn’t heard back from Warner Bros. in the latest round of bids. “Then why are we talking?” Gilstrap responded, worried the Disney bid would expire.
Two minutes were left and still no call from Warner Brothers. Then it came. They matched Disney’s offer.
“I just want to bounce it back and forth,” Snyder said. “Mind if I keep trying?”
“Why would I mind?” Gilstrap was dumbstruck at the amount of money on the table.
Soon, Warner Brothers won the auction. The check cleared and the movie was never made––not uncommon in Hollywood. But Gilstrap got the pay day every writer dreams of. The week before, he’d cancelled his subscription to The Washington Post because it was too expensive. Today, he was more than a million dollars richer.
“As my wife Joy said at one point when the numbers were going around, ‘okay, the book is good, but let’s be honest. It’s not that good’,” Gilstrap says. “It’s the nature of the entertainment business.”
“There are really a lot of talented people who don’t’ get the lightning strike…I think I’m good at what I do, but there’s a lot of luck involved.”
His success, however well-earned, showed him a side of the business he’d never experienced. One of the attributes of the crime-writing community is the generosity displayed by those who’ve made it toward those who are still aspiring. Getting a book published is not a zero-sum game. One success lifts many others and helps direct the industry as it feels its way toward the next trend.
“The dark side is you become very aware––once you’re in the club and start meeting people––not everyone embraces your success. Many were expecting me to be an asshole. I really was humbled by it all.”
He notes one experience where a famous author refused to shake his hand the first time they met. They’ve never talked since.
A year after his big payday, Gilstrap met one of the agents who rejected his manuscript. “Okay, you’re my mistake,” she told him. Still, she wasn’t the last one. Six months after Nathan’s Run was a worldwide bestseller, he received his final rejection.
You sometimes wonder who’s on first in this business.
“There’s lightning strikes and serendipity in everything in this business,” Gilstrap says, “which is encouraging and terrifying at the same time.”
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Nathan’s Run
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Decided to write a novel: 33 years old
Experience: Firefighter, safety & environmental consultant
Agent Rejections: 27
Time to Sell Novel: 3 days
First Novel Agent: Molly Friedrich
First Novel Editor: Rick Horgan
First Novel Publisher: Harper Collins
Age when published: 39
Inspiration: All of the above. His wife. Joy.
Website: JohnGilstrap.com
Advice to Writers: Write the story that pleases you. Drown out all those other voices. Don’t listen to other people too early. Don’t value their criticism over your own instincts. Sometimes they’re just wrong.
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